punk & blanket

Thursday, January 29, 2015

As you guys all know we have a history of confrontation in the face of dumbness. We don't often start a fight but we normally finish it. So it was with some surprise that we found ourselves in mediation with our office-mate, Mia the mummy blogger.

It started as most modern spats do, with a tweet. We were researching images of Prince Andrew sweating and grinding for our cartoons when we saw a headline about The Australian of The Year 2015 recipient. Shocked, confused we shot out a quick tweet.

We were trying to render Andrew's teeth when two uniformed police officers appeared in tow with Mia. She was a weird mix of scared and smug. The officers asked if we were punk and blanket and we said yes. We reach for pens assuming they want an autograph but they say they have reason to believe that our conduct has been of a threatening nature to our office mate and that she no longer feels safe to be near us in the workplace. We know it's not a joke as Mia doesn't have a sense of humour. For sometime we remained silent, as silent as Gerard Baden-Clay taking the 5th.

Eventually they asked us if we had any understanding of why Mia might be afraid. We kept staring blankly. Constable Bethany Brown in a tough little girl voice goes "Mia reckons you guys published a hateful and provocative attack on survivors of family violence, accompanied by menacing visual imagery. Have you guys been on Twitter this afternoon?"

It was impossible to lie. Twitter was open on the desktop of our very large screen Apple MacIntosh computer. We hand the mouse to Constable Beth and her offsider, Constable Dean Marsh. We let them scroll away and got back to the royal teeth. Mia becomes agitated, probably because it's the first time she realises our ambivalence to authority is real. Screeching between the Constables and pointing at the Emojis, she looks like she is on the verge of a panic attack and demands an intervention order. We know we are living in the era of the sook but that seemed pretty extreme. The police threw water on her request and suggested it was an issue more suited to mediation.

Brian, our mediator told us that Mia said she needed a support person to 'balance up the room'. That was fine by us, even though she brought Fi (her grief counsellor who tried to make us rat on Sir Elton) with her. She had also requested that we not be in the waiting area when she arrived. That was also fine by us.

The mediation kicked off with Mia telling Brian (reading straight from her copious notes) her reasons as to why her safety was threatened by us. The tweet was just the final straw and confirmed in her mind that we were "probably sociopathic". She provided an extensive list of transgressions.

1. They are self-absorbed. Example, they only blog about themselves and things that only interest them.

7. Think they are special because they think they can channel dead surrealists.

8. They laugh at fat people. Example, they go deep water running and make jokes about getting caught in the whirlpool of a fat person's slipstream. They say they feel like corks.

9. They openly tell her small children that their drawings don't look like what they are supposed to be.

10. They never like the pictures of her friends children on Facebook.

11. She has heard that they have invented a parlour game for their parties called Mia Translations where guests have to translate her sayings. "He's been here before", about her middle son, would translate as, "My child is Jesus".

Addressing us, Brian asked if we would like to put our issues on the table. We said we are simply here to move forward. Before proceeding to the negotiation phase, Brian called private sessions with each of us. Mia went first, which was great as it gave us some time to smash through a couple of levels of Candy Crush. Brian came back and informed us he was not in a position to relay what Mia had said but that we could now talk freely. We really did feel comfortable with Brian as there was a non-judgemental openness to his bearded face. He looked like a friendly bunyip that would be receptive to our truth. We say Mia has an over-inflated idea about the importance of her blog and we think she has an unhealthy attachment to her followers and her opinions. She doesn't understand what we do and what we stand for, she doesn't know the difference between mischief and contempt. She's always at us to get 'sponsors' for our blog and won't accept that we will never be monetised or appear on The Project. Brian nods and says Mia does appear to be quite opinionated. We raise the hashtag activism scene that Mia is mixed up in, where people wear compassion like they would band t-shirts. Brian indicated he was familiar with these sort of pretenders. He thinks Ben Quilty and his mob of supporters are making it worse for Andrew and Myr. We agree and tell him we call it 'compassion porn' and think it's a really dark practice. Normally in lore, people smudge with sage bundles to dispel bad energy fields. We tell him we believe being in the room during a punk and blanket session is the surrealist equivalent of being smudged and Mia is not changing despite our daily presence. Brian terminated the mediation at that point.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

2. For never, ever shouting a round of drinks, even when we've had a bad day.

3. As to his failure to act as a proper rock n roll elder, we cite the Bittersweet Symphony grab.

4. We've had enough of him trying to crack on to our friends kids at all our events.

5. Upon reflection, we overlooked some unpleasant things. Like that time in Bali. We were all hungry after climbing the volcano. Mick was the only one to decline the villagers' offerings of fried fish. He ate from a picnic basket especially delivered to him from his five-star hotel.

6. We're sick of him using us to gain proximity to influential and important artists, especially those favoured by the aristocracy (he thinks he knows about art, but he doesn't; he just looks at the price tags and his reflection in the glass of the paintings).

7. For ridiculing Ned Kelly.

8. Against all our advice, he made the documentary called Being Mick in 2001. We told him he'd look like a middle-aged bubble boy, and he does.

9. He rings us up, emails, doesn't ask how we are, doesn't ask about Claire, just bangs on and on about what some blogger has said about him that week.

10. For not giving a shit about anyone...no-one....absolutely no-one. We've
realised every time we've spoken with Mick about people's
vulnerabilities, he just goes ahead and ruins their lives.

Monday, March 31, 2014

Sunday, March 02, 2014

Best
Actor In A Leading Role - Queensland Undercover Officer known as Joe Emery for outstanding performance in the capture of child killer Brett Peter Cowan. The Officer spent months building
a rapport with his target after "befriending" him by sitting next to
him on a flight to Perth.

Best
Screenplay - Queensland Undercover Operatives (no names) for writing
"scenarios" of illegal gang activity, including
collecting debts, bribing court officials and buying illegal firearms, drugs
and even "blood diamonds" from Africa in order to trap their target
into making admissions.

Best
Supporting Actors - Queensland Undercover Operatives known as Fitzy and Ian for posing as
members of a large and powerful criminal gang.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

This latest true crime story has left us spent. We are
tired, very tired, exhausted by processing information about a decorator’s
suspicious death. It’s another society murder and this time it’s across the
road.

We have been here before but never have we had such
proximity. We were heavily entrenched in the Matthew Wales-King matter in 2002:
we knew Paul King’s barber, shopped at Maritza’s boutique, and like her,
preferred Agostino’s daiquiri mix.One
of our friends even sat in his Porsche outside the Glen Iris crime scene with
the media, feeding us eyewitness accounts.We’d often try to coerce our friends at Malvern CIB in to letting us see
the room where they interviewed Matthew for the very first time.

We also cannot wait for the Gerard Baden-Clay trial in
August as we have followed it forensically.We have contacts in Brisbane but no one connected to affluent Brookfield
society, so we have formed our own view:anyone who has time to gel and style his hair before his wife’s funeral
is a person of interest. Debate rages in our circles as to whether Joe Korp and
Tania Hermann fall into ‘aspirational society murder’ or just straight ‘society
murder’. There are also problems with the categorisation of Herman Rockefeller
- dinner parties have turned bad discussing that one.

However, this time we live across the road. And it
begins as most fires do, with the smell of smoke.It was Saturday night and we were relaxing
after a hard days work selling art and drinking shandies at the Toorak Bowls
Club.One of us was playing Candy Crush
and the other was staring at the wall when we smelt smoke.We knew immediately what it was, familiar as
we are with the smell of a burning house. We briefly discussed calling the fire
brigade but we thought it would be wise to check Incident Alert Vic SA on
Twitter first. They reported a Malvern Rd structure fire not yet under control.
We knew this was big because Incident Alert Vic SA has ‘Large Incidents’ on its
profile pic. We heard sirens, finished our activities and went to bed.

Next morning we woke up and went straight to the computer.
A leading Melbourne decorator had been found dead in the charred remains of his
apartment behind his shop on Malvern Road. When we first moved to Melbourne that
shop confused us. It’s one of those shops that are not really shops, sort of
more like poshed up self-storage. After a comprehensive online search,
including galleries of his work, we realised it was true: people paid him to decorate
their mansions. We took our Staffordshire Terrier for what would be his last
walk for seven days, because when we passed Minimax, we stepped right into
another Melbourne Society Murder vortex. We tied up the dog and went inside.

Howls were bouncing off the hard shiny surfaces, a
full-on lamentation was spilling out onto the ‘village’. Women with bobs and
Husk bags were united in grief. Some of them knew the decorator, had heard of
the decorator, had him as Godfather to their children. Some had friends who
knew his friends.We felt the familiar
rush of ‘wanting to know more’, so we joined in the wailing, hugging, inching
in closer to women who appeared to really know the deceased. Overhearing talk
about a pilgrimage to the decorator’s shop we purchase some ‘cheap’ stocking
fillers and follow the line of Jeeps a block and a half down the road. A couple
of days later the boyfriend is arrested. Those of the pilgrimage who had
embraced the numb and silent widower were now wondering if they might have been
hugging a murderer.

Our newsroom was fully operational since before the
arrest and now we’re pulling overtime. Everyone is in a frenzy – the intel is
pouring in at such a rate we’ve had to prioritise our information sharing on a
range of criteria: highest priority goes to those who return our texts. And people
like our musician friend, who sends daily pics of the evolving floral display in
the shop window gets classified information. There was talk about a candle starting the fire. Some sources were particularly
interested in this information given the deceased was known to be scared of candles.
He only used them for decoration (privately, we have always wondered why people
would pay so much money for something they were going to burn). Misinformation
regarding the brand of the candle drove us mental. People told us it was a
Diptyque candle the couple had purchased from a famous local perfumery shortly
before the crime. But we looked that up and discovered Diptyque candles were
only $60 and didn’t look like the kind of candles the decorator would use for
style over function. A very reliable source intervened and said no, it was a
$100 Cire Trudon candle. That seemed much more credible.

Another thing about the Melbourne Society Murder vortex
that can be annoying (apart from the fact that one of us is eating and one is
not) is interference from other newsrooms.People have been ringing us with their creative ideas, trying to impress
us with their knowledge of the case. Some even tried to influence this piece,
texting at all hours with title suggestions.Hence we have turned off all of our devices whilst we write this.

There are those who have been ridiculously
competitive.One friend questioned our
ability to detect the smoke, asking us exactly where we live. He was in South
Yarra and we were Prahran so the wind must have been blowing the wrong way, he
surmised. We have also had moral competition, like last night at a cocktail
party.About eight of us were sitting
around making polite conversation.One
of us thought enough subjects had been covered and finally said, ‘Hey, are we
going to talk about the fire now?’Someone
said “Yes”, someone else let out a single clap and we all leaned in.All except Steph who exclaimed, “There will
be no talk about the decorator tonight, this is a human being’s life we are
talking about, and it’s not gossip”.Everyone’s faces dropped.Vibe
ruined.Steph is an older woman who
speaks like a headmaster so we found ourselves obeying her embargo.Even, the host.We apologised and went into mediation mode asking
Steph if she knew the couple.She said
she didn’t.

Today we spotted two prominent society trend
forecasters heading towards the now brimming shop front.We had a little laugh at the spring in their
step because we have seen them at parties and they have made jokes about the decorator
and his friends as being ‘A-List of bad taste’.

With our studies of true crime we have noticed a
golden thread throughout Melbourne’s society murders – it appears that in each
case someone says ‘ENOUGH.’ We’ve noticed that in this matter there are now
mutterings on the airwaves suggesting power imbalances. We await the committal
in June. That’s a good amount of time to recover before we find out the facts.

Friday, July 26, 2013

Of the millions of pictures shot by photographers in the bushes there is only one known Stiffie Pic.

September 1996, Daniel Ducruet (husband of Princess Stephanie of Monaco) with Muriel "Fili" Mol-Houteman, Miss Bare Breasts of Belgium 1995. Ducruet was later banished from the Kingdom by Prince Rainier III.

Monday, July 08, 2013

We found this list in Mia "The Mummy Blogger" and Jason's bin. We've seen these venting lists before, written in a stream of consciousness at Dad's in Distress groups. Jason is clearly experiencing early onset self-actualisation.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Last night we went to see Claire Voyant, our healer, life coach and friend. Lately the world has become a scary place, it's a jungle out there and the kids are having a shit childhood. We need clarity from a Crystal Ball.

Claire never reads her Ball publicly because she isn't a sideshow spook. We have never seen the Ball but we know it's message to be the clearest. If there was ever a time where we needed to see the Ball it was now. We took offerings of some retired Pandoras Claire had on her wishlist. She was thrilled to receive them and said, 'do you wanna see the Ball?'.

Claire's Ball was just your standard carnival issue. No wonder she'd been self conscious. Concentrating on our 'topic of focus' we gazed into the Ball balancing on Claire's stretching arms. A vision appears. It is Wendi Deng and Cherie Blair curled in a mating ball, slithering and flickering in deep space.

4. Any members of Coldplay (esp. Chris Martin) - Coldplay is the sort of music you can listen to when your parents are home and your mum would love to take you to their concert. And as for you, Chris, even if she was pretty awesome wouldn't there be a point where you'd put your hand up and go "But wait, it's Gwyneth Paltrow"?

5. Elle McPherson - the cameras have snapped her soul away. We cannot be anywhere near her.

6. Bob Brown - some people have been horrified when we say we have never liked Bob Brown. He has been a bad face for the Greens.

7. Anyone who has ever worked for or voluntarily listened to Austereo.

8. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge - it would be catastrophic if we were in a social environment with these two because our strong ethical beliefs would drive us to tell them the truth: that they are perpetuating a dangerous mix of feudalism and celebrity.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

We're at a BBQ at Mia's place in Brighton. All of the women have brought earthen bowls of ancient grain salads, some with quenelles of home-made labne. Jason is out the back tea-smoking farmed trout, beaming with smooth pride. A former athlete, Jason unashamedly favours a low-carb beer while Mia churns out carb-less white-spirit cocktails for 'the girls'.

We were a late addition to the evening which had been planned for months. A babysitter was looking after all of their children - except for Flynn, who was asleep in her room - so the parents could have their me time together. They shared stories of birthing, parenting, post-natal depression, teething and growing up too fast. Mia juggled advice, ancient grains, pouring glasses of Tasmanian Rain, all the while cooing into the mouthpiece of her state-of-the-art B&O baby monitor. It was like a Madonna mic with an ear and mouth piece so she can sooth Flynn remotely.

Tania, a mother of twins and mature aged student who'd returned to school to study Natropathy, is sitting next to us and keeps saying 'Isn't Mia great?', but it's not really a question. She says to us, 'You guys work online too, don't you? Mia's told me your site is really fascinating. It sounds like a terrific idea.' Before we know it, Tania is trying to sniff Sir Elton's private life out of us like a truffle pig. Throwing her off the scent, we tell Tania we make it all up and back-off towards the blokes smoking trout. We often find sanctuary in the comfortable silence of men.

Fiona ('Fi'), a grief counsellor, comes out the back and asks for a puff, she's normally not a smoker but after a few drinks... She used to smoke a lot before she had children and even when they were little babies because 'they didn't know the smell'. The talk of pregnancy segued to a direct line of questioning from Fi about Sir Elton and David's second child. Luckily Mia walked passed and we grabbed her tanned arm, asking to see the baby as we knew our wish would be granted immediately.

All the way up to Flynn's cot, Mia, who is a little bit tipsy now and unsteady on her feet, regales us with Flynn's sleep history and visits to Sleep School. 'I could never leave her with a baby sitter,' she explains, 'The separation anxiety would be too bad.' As we stand by the cot, what Mia calls the 'Love Mobile' hangs above the cradle. It is fashioned from coconut shells with photographs of Mia pulling various faces attached to them, each one a different version of 'the mother'. She lists them for us:

We have had to sublet part of our workspace due to the Global Financial Crisis which is really hitting Australia hard. Mia, an online editor and publisher of issues to do with parenting has moved in. In her application she demonstrated a vast knowledge of our site as she had noted the various ups and downs with our tenuous, volatile relationship with Sir Elton.

Mia has three children with partner Jason: Baxter 6, Atlas 4 and a little girl called Flynn who is 15 months. She's very busy. Kerryn, her personal assistant helped her set up her workstation. They've been friends for a really long time and finish each other's sentences. Kerryn is also a mother but only has her children fifty per cent shared care as part of the court order with her ex. As we watched, Mia art directed her 'Wonder Wall', a collection of keepsake images of her family. Kerryn suggested using the proof sheets of Flynn's professional shoot and Mia went with it, deciding on 'eye level, and to the right'.

On her application, Mia had ticked the box for coffee machine. We were slightly deflated when Kerryn unpacked the Nespresso, and with that we discreetly retrieved our Gloria Jean's loyalty cards from the bin. Kerryn was coming at us with Decaffeinato Lungo, we diverted the situation by popping the bottle of Bollinger we'd bought especially for the occasion. As always happens with French, one bottle is never enough. Mia gave Kerryn money to go to the shops and buy three more bottles. Before too long, we were all shouting to each other about ourselves. No one was listening. The last memory is Kerryn shouting down her mobile to her new partner Brendan saying she's maggoted.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

As you guys know, The Art Gallery of New South Wales is playing host to works by one Francis Bacon.

We've been reading about him and we don't like him. We are particularly offended to hear he was 'fascinated with Marcel Duchamp' - one of the Founding Fathers of Surrealism - to the point of muscling in on Marc's schtick (otherwise known as theft). In our direct line session last night, we asked Marc if our feelings on Bacon aligned with Surrealist thought out there in the great nothingness. He used the term 'Sacred Monster' and likened Bacon to, as he said 'Your AJ Miller.' We said 'Who?' Marc took control of the keyboards and directed our computer to this site.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

We were anxious to get inside, behind those concertina doors screening off the judges. It was past one o'clock - clearly punctuality is only mandatory for entrants. The show secretary did pop her head through the doors to acknowledge our arrival as we were the first ever metropolitan exhibitors, but she very quickly snapped them shut. The judges tardiness allowed us to take advantage of the two course luncheon: corned beef, mustard sauce and a selection of vegetables (not necessarily different) and apple pie.

The concertina doors finally parted to reveal the show. The displays were so genuinely breathtaking it took us a while to get to our own creation. After getting sucked in by the bearded irises for a while we did away with politeness and pushed our way through to the Worst Arrangement section. We looked everywhere for our names but as the eyesight of the stewards was bad, the decision had been made to mark us down as 'P. Blanket.'
Reece and his staff at Mooroopna Florists did follow our instructions: make it look like shit, wrap it in newspaper and attach the filthiest card you have in the shop.

Their choice of card was magnificent - a torn piece of an envelope with a scribbled missive. Our proxy stager also showed independence with her creativity, choosing to remove most of the petals of the only actual flower and housing our arrangement in the previous evening's Butter Chicken container, label still in tact with lingering aroma.

As bad as it was, it was not worse than reigning champ, Noreen.

Noreen was obviously sure of herself in this category. We learnt on the way down she had suggested the show secretary relax the NO LATE ENTRIES rule for us city folk and had offered to secret our entry through the back door. She didn't see us as a threat. And we weren't, because she won.

Arch Nemesis

We didn't even come second.
The Mooroopna Garden Club has not seen the last of P. Blanket.

We are finally in transit heading towards certain victory. We are competitors in the Mooroopna 62nd Anniversary Spring Flower, Craft and Floral Art Show, Section 19 (Novelty Section), No. 151 'Worst Arrangement'.
It's been a long and winding road. The schedule said NO LATE ENTRIES, but our train from the city was scheduled to arrive at 11.48am and all exhibits must be staged ready for Judging by 11.30am. We placed a call to the show secretary who happens to be related to us but she was categorical in her response: NO LATE ENTRIES. At first we were slightly taken aback, as we did expect some level of favouritism, but then we realised that the show secretary lives by the same moral code we do. She was doing the right thing, but nothing was going to stop us. Rather than adopt the supplier/technician model a-la Jeff Koons/Damian Hirst and employ studio serfs, we decided to be more inclusive/collaborative with regional surrealists. They were not hard to find.

The genesis of our idea came from an incident in the 1980s where neither of us were present. Our friend Randal had received an apology in the form of a bunch of very expensive roses from his frenemy, Kate. In disgust, he chopped their heads off with a designer cleaver. Our Worst Arrangement entry is titled 'To Kate From Randal' .

After confirming with the show secretary that entries in the Worst Arrangement category were exempt from Item 1 of the Rules and Definitions which expressly states that 'All exhibits must be grown by Exhibitors and have been in his or her possession for two months prior to the show', we got to work. We needed a proxy artisan and a proxy stager. We ran our remote plan by the show secretary: a local florist had agreed to assemble our work to our exacting instructions and an upstanding and capable community figure would stage our entry. The show secretary, shocked, said 'No! You have to make it yourself!' By this point we were becoming exasperated by what we perceived to be the undercurrents of a regional blockade against city entrants. We reiterated that the florist is working to our exacting instructions, we were not just buying the worst arrangement in the shop. It was OUR creation. The show secretary had bigger fish to fry. There were only 45 minutes remaining before registration would be cut off, the phone was running hot and she 'didn't want to listen to any more voicemail messages'. In a loud voice so her staff could hear she simply said 'Alright then, I didn't hear any of that,' then louder still: 'And no one here heard any of that'.

This is very difficult. Don't be at home for anyone, and occasionally, when no one has forced his way in, interrupting you in the midst of your Surrealist activity, and you, crossing your arms, say: "It doesn't matter, there are doubtless better things to do or not do. Interest in life is indefensible Simplicity, what is going on inside me, is still tiresome to me!" or an other revolting banality.